


Debellatio

by spinalimmobilization (gilead)



Series: Meet Me There [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-26
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-03-25 19:02:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3821368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gilead/pseuds/spinalimmobilization
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It snows in July, and Clarke and Lexa meet five years after parting ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Debellatio

**Author's Note:**

> Debellatio (also debellation) (“defeating, or the act of conquering or subduing", literally, "warring (the enemy) down", from Latin bellum "war") designates the end of a war caused by the absolute destruction of one combatant. (wikipedia.org)

When everyone else on the road drives like the world is ending, Clarke pulls over, picks up her purse, and prepares to walk the remaining four miles home.

It's one of the deepest days of summer, and snow is falling in whiteout quantities, in larger flakes than she has ever seen. Armed with a poncho from her glove compartment, she elects to risk hypothermia over dying pinned under her car, holding out for overtaxed emergency services. It's not a decision she makes lightly, but she's always harboured a love for dangerous things, and in this case, freak weather she has no natural defences against.

The flurries are spectacular, and she passes three fender-benders with sympathetic flinches, but the fourth is accompanied by an infant's wail. It gives her pause, and she's always been accused of being soft: more curse than blessing.

There's another well-meaning passerby already there, back turned to her and bent over the driver's side of the other vehicle on scene. Clarke turns her attention to the SUV several feet away, cataloguing the damage. A streetlamp wraps around its left side, and skids in the snow tell the story of a violent swerve after sliding into the oncoming lane.

As she rounds the car, she peers into the window, where an infant nestled in fleece howls from a car seat. Loud babies are living babies, and she goes on to open the passenger's door. There's a man in blood-stained business attire slumped against the wheel, body twisted away from her, but not at an unnatural angle.

“Sir, are you awake?” She coaxes, leaning over the centre console to turn off the ignition. 

He doesn't respond, and she gingerly checks his radial pulse. To her limited knowledge, it's steady, only just elevated. She can see his phone where it's been thrown to the floor of the vehicle from her position, screen flashing with missed calls.

“Is he alive?” A voice addresses her back.

“Yeah, he's—” Clarke turns and nearly buckles under the full force of her shock. It's the good samaritan from the other vehicle. Her face is split neatly between familiar and foreign, more savage than memory serves. But there is nothing of this new severity in the way Lexa scrutinizes her in turn.

Something in the SUV creaks, and Lexa brushes past her.

“Take it easy.” She slips into an easy command, climbing into the car to begin an assessment.

Clarke watches, barely able to believe. The years spent abroad covering her countrymen's war have recast Lexa's accent into something faintly un-American. Clarke had followed her sporadic articles and shaky videos, until she couldn't.

“What happened?” The speaker is male, lethargic.

“You swerved into a lamp. There's a scalp laceration,” Lexa observes, short and sharp. “More blood than injury. I'm more concerned about a concussion.”

“I'm fine, I feel fine,” the man asserts, loosening his tie. “Oh God, my family.” 

“Your phone's here.” Clarke points it out. “Your kid's fine too. I'll take care of it.”

She leaves Lexa to what she does best, and clambers into the backseat.

“Hey, baby,” she whispers, the volume of its cries already beginning to dial down. “You're with me.”

Something about holding the child inexplicably calms her, perhaps the idea of it between her and Lexa, the most powerful of shields. Cradling her temporary charge, Clarke scoots out and glances towards the hunched form of the other driver.

“Just shock,” Lexa explains, following her gaze. 

Her hair is plastered to the side of her face and down her neck, and before Clarke knows it, they're locked in something resembling a stare-down. She's struggling to place this Lexa—to reconcile the younger version she knew, a passionate but coltish student of journalism, to the woman before her, stock still with an unnameable manner of physicality. What Lexa sees, she can't begin to fathom.

“You're very competent,” Lexa notes flatly.

Clarke's lips pull up humorlessly. “Maybe in first aid. I never finished medical school.”

“You were never meant for medicine.” It's overly familiar, and Lexa's recognition of this passes over her face a moment later. Instead of the appropriate abashment, she looks all the more intent. “What do you do now?”

“I curate.” Clarke's the sort naturally inclined to share herself with others, her successes and her failures, her love for art. She knows Lexa will listen, in that rapt, measured she always has, and it will make Clarke feel the way she always has. She fights down the urge, its grip on her. “How long have you been back?”

“One week, three days.” Lexa pauses. “I'm adjusting.”

Clarke doesn't want to think about what returning to the city must be like for Lexa, but her mind goes there as soon as her heart does. 

She's soft, and weak, and she feels for Lexa. “I can't imagine.”

“If anyone could, you would.” It terrifies Clarke, that Lexa seems to believe it. 

“Just stop,” she begs, racing to the end of this stilted excuse of a conversation. “I can't do this with you.”

“Can't do what with me?”

Clarke wants to shout her denial, to say any number of hurtful things, but the rage is no longer there. All the lies will do is expose more of herself than she will Lexa. She settles on the desperate truth at the core of it all: “I can't care, Lexa.”

But she's too late to save herself from the recollection: the morning the shelling started, the coffee in the kitchen, then on the sheets. The shrillness of Lexa's work ringtone, the shift in her inflections that had taken Clarke months to learn, then Lexa, unreadable, untouchable, and finally, unreachable. Her half of their possessions: her cameras, her motorcycle, her collection of travel mugs, and Clarke, abandoned for Lexa's people, and their war across the sea.

“I'm sorry, Clarke.”

“Don't apologize. You did your people a service,” Clarke says. “It's done.”

“My wife is coming back for me,” the concussed man announces, loud and deliberate. “The both of you went above and beyond. Thank you.”

The baby is beginning to fuss again, and Clarke bounces it gently. There they stand, three unwilling sides to a rigid triangle, until Lexa retreats to prod around the dried blood in the man's hair. 

“Stitches are unnecessary. Go home, have your wife check on you every few hours, and see a doctor as soon as possible.”

“Here's your guy.” Clarke passes the bundle onto the father, unable to justify a longer delay.

Then it's only her and Lexa, halfway to snowed in. The street is empty, the lights are on in the houses, and the city has collectively surrendered to the storm.

“Clarke, I...” Lexa's jaw flexes, the tendons in her neck jumping.

“What, Lexa?”

“I don't have new answers for you. I did what I had to. Please understand.” Lexa steps in, too close for comfort. “Just tell me, if our time has passed.”

Clarke doesn't respond, and Lexa's mask slips just once as she turns to go.

Lexa had pleaded with her only one other time. That was before, when Clarke moved out of their shared apartment, vowing to forget the disarray of their shared studio, and the woman she painted there. 

But Clarke understands now more than she did five years ago: the price of loyalty, the carnage in the wake of passion. She's paid her own dues since then, and left her own swathe of destruction without war.

Snow in July, she thinks, it's not too late. The most acute of her pain has dulled to a distant ache. Lexa is alive. Someone, something, has pulled the stars into alignment for her, just this once.

“Wait,” she calls out.

Lexa stops, but doesn't turn back, as if it was a trick of the mind. Clarke retraces her steps in the snow and places her hand in the centre of Lexa's back.

“The last video I saw,” Clarke tells her, “was the bomb outside Parliament.”

Lexa drops her head, and Clarke knows they're relieving the same memory, except hers stops abruptly where the feed cuts off just as glass begins to fly.

“I'm here.” Lexa spins, square to Clarke, looking at her for all the world as if there is nothing else to see.

Clarke may never believe it as a promise, but for the time being, it's the truth.


End file.
